By Ted Bigham on April 7, 2017

How To Track Online Conversions – calculate conversion rate

Does your business track online conversions?

If so, are you doing it properly? If you don’t track online conversions properly you are wasting your money. Learn about the common mistakes small businesses are making when they track online conversions and how to fix it so you grow your business and get more customers.

Tracking online conversions for small business has a major problem. There is currently no guaranteed way of fully tracking every sale in a local business. With e-commerce it is easy, you know who bought what when and usually they paid with a credit card. It is very difficult to track the lifetime value of a customer using you spend your due diligence on it. So how can you track online conversions properly?

Short of asking each client where did they hear of you, tracking receipts, and doing so for a full year, businesses are limited in the full transparency of the true value of a new customer. That one new customer you get from using Google online advertising can generate revenue for years to come. Very rarely are customers so fickle, shocked, or hate your product so much that they never come back, quite the opposite. You want customers to love your product and come back; that is probably why you are still in business. So what is the answer?

The truth is that for small businesses like local restaurants, no one has found the answer yet but there are some minor fixes.

Adwords professionals dance around this issue but it is a major issue. There are tools that track conversions and in the simpliest form a coversion formula is:

Number of Total Clicks / Number of Actions Measured x 100 = Conversion Rate

This formula doesn’t help much though. To learn how to track online conversions a little backstory on your business goals is needed. The goals you track are essential to measure success. Are you tracking who calls? Who clicks on your link? How long they stay on your website? If that click leads to them signing up for something? The list goes on.

Those are all great items to track but for brick and mortar stores the digital disconnect truly becomes apparent when they get stuck on the fundamental question: How do I track online conversions? It is a great question and one that requires a good online advertising or marketing professional find the best fit for your business.

Many times, the conversion process falls short somewhere due to the lack of systems in place missing essential tracking of the customer. Most or all local restaurants do not have loyalty cards or receipt tracking hooked up to analytics for how to track online conversions. The disconnect is that people do not make a purchase from their website and it is not linked to their cash register. For example, a customer sees an online ad, goes to the website, looks at the menu and then decides to call to reserve a table or simply goes to the restaurant, orders food, pays and leaves. They could come back every week after that for 10 years and that sale was never tracked back to that online ad.

This could have simply been fixed by the server ‘asking, “So how did you hear about us?”. Often times the customer forgets or they might say something like, “we had seen the place for a while and thought it was time to stop in”. Very general and does not help in tracking. A manager needs to do their due diligence to have the waiters or hosts write down the reason for the customer’s visit. I can say that if you track online conversions and write this information down you will improve your success ten-fold simply because it shows you truly care about your business.

Contact Kow Abundant and we can work on your digital disconnect to make sure that conversions are measured correctly and that you have clear goals and milestones set for your business. kowabundant.com